One of the ethical issues that arises when undertaking interviews with prisoners, warders, policemen, freedom fighters and other individuals who have been vic-tim of violence or have perpetrated violence is how to approach the often still traumatic event. Even if the researcher is careful not to ask any direct question about her interlocutor’s personal experience of violence, when the latter does emerge in an interview, it is essential to let the conversation flow, leaving the in-terviewee to reconstruct their personal narrative. Sometimes the inin-terviewee chooses to avoid the event at the last moment. At other times, the narrator de-cides to describe the event, inducing a potentially intense remembrance. During the interviews that I conducted with inmates in Pollsmoor, interviewees who de-scribed situations of physical violence mainly referred to police and warders’
acts of brutality, solitary confinement, inmate fights and sexual assaults. Evoca-tions of structural and psychological violence generally dotted the narratives in more diffuse ways.
The interviewee’s circumspections are subsequently reflected in and rein-forced by the historian’s narrative choices. How can one describe and analyse other people’s personal memories of violence without reproducing this very vio-lence?³³ To which extent is it possible to explore the dynamics of silence and am-nesia in the construction of individual and collective memory? InEl Vano Ayer, Isaac Rosa questions the possibility of writing a novel about the Francoist dicta-torship without using a series of stereotypically narrative tricks common to most
Belinda Bozzoli,“Interviewing the Women of Phokeng,”extracted from Belinda Lozzoli, with Mmantho Nkotsoe,Women of Phokeng, Life Strategy and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (London: Heinemann, 1991) in Perks and Thomson,The Oral History Reader, 159.
Susan Sontag,Regarding the Pain of Others(London: Penguin, 2004).
Spanish texts on the period.³⁴He devotes several chapters to the phenomenon of torture. Describing imaginary cases of torture in the Madrid headquarters of the security police (Dirección General de Seguridad), Rosa shifts between narrating voices–a male student, a female student, an anarchist, and a handbook of tor-ture addressed to policemen– and styles, from allusive accounts to extremely detailed description to ironic representation as staged pain and repression.
One of his characters, in the midst of having his fingers broken one after the next by the Francoist police of the late 1960s, asserts that it is useless to attempt to convey the experience of pain. Only in-depth research on the historical prac-tice of torture can make up for this impossibility:
Because speaking of torture using generalities is like saying nothing; when one says that under Francoism people were tortured, it is fundamental to describe the ways people were tortured, the patterns, the methods, the intensity; because not doing so means disre-garding the real suffering; it is not possible to dismiss the question with general assertions like“torture was a common practice”or“thousands of men and women were tortured”;
this amounts to saying nothing, to awarding impunities; it is imperative to collect testimo-nies, to specify the methods of torture, so that it will not have been in vain.³⁵
The role of the historian might consist in rescuing the most detailed accounts of violence, as different actors involved in the maintenance or undermining of au-thoritarian regimes perpetuated it. However, as contexts like South Africa and Spain show in different ways, toforgettraumatic events is an essential feature of collective memory. Forgetting is often linked to the muffling of voices that threaten the coherence of official historical discourses, yet sometimes it can be a necessary means to deal with the memory of trauma and loss.³⁶There is, in-deed, a fine line between a silence that is imposed from outside and a silence that is crucial for one’s own reconstruction and mental health. These consider-ations often confront oral history projects that relate to violence, requiring the historian to carefully navigate between them. The main idea is to avoid both the re-enactment of violence and the reproduction of the official silencing of marginalised voices.
During my interviews at Pollsmoor Prison, I witnessed different ways of dealing with the memory of violence. Each of these approaches was a telling
ex- Isaac Rosa,El Vano Ayer(Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2012).
Ibid,156. Author’s translation.
Dario Paez, Nekane Basabe and Jose Luis Gonzalez,“Social Processes and Collective Mem-ory: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Remembering Political Events,”Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. James W. Pennebaker, Diario Paez and Bernard Rim (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,1997), 147–174.
ample as to the difficulties of coping with the memory of illegal, unsettling and disruptive life events. Generally, some slight differences emerged between the ac-counts of violence presented by male and female prisoners to a female research-er. Both male and female inmates talked quite openly about everyday assaults by warders as well as more exceptional tactics of repression, sometimes headed by the emergency task force, that took place during the second half of apartheid and during the democratic transition. Many men spoke about the way they be-came involved in violence against warders and fellow inmates. Sexual assaults were alluded to but not described, and certainly not as a first-person account.
Women, in contrast, suggested the possibility of inmate fights but could, at times, give precise details about intimate relationships, gender performances and sexual abuses. In one case, a female prisoner narrated how she was raped on her first day of confinement, an event that still remains a vivid memory for her:“This is a day that I will never really forget. It was the most scary day of my life. I think it was the first time reality really came down on me. […] You know this was a long time ago! And I never really talked about it because I never want-ed to relive that evening.”³⁷Despite this assertion she seems to have felt the need to break her silence around the traumatic event. Indeed, the precise account of abuse was the answer she offered to the standard question on her first day in prison.
Interviews with warders also shed light on distinct ways of remembering– and accepting–the use of repressive violence. Some warders framed past mea-sures as legitimate, pondered and measured actions. They saw it not as repres-sion but principled discipline. The disappearance of“law and order”measures explained the chaos they thought prevailed in present-day prisons. Other ward-ers, representing a new post-apartheid generation, criticised the former methods but still legitimised them through an“other era–hierarchical orders”argument.
One of the most disturbing themes for warders seems to have been the memory of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU). Each time I broached the subject of POPCRU at Pollsmoor Prison and the affiliation of warders to the trade union, the warders expressed embarrassment or fear. Only a few declared them-selves to have been directly and proudly involved in the union, which was ille-gally funded in 1989 and formally authorised in 1994. Warders alluded to the au-thorities’violence in vague terms. They spoke more freely about inmate violence, such as the staff member who recalled how he used to collect“dead inmates that were murdered, during the night maybe.”³⁸
Interview, Mrs. Tillis, Pollsmoor Women Prison, 30 March 2011
Interview, Mr. Hillier, head of section, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 26 February 2008.
In this context, one interview stood out. One of the youngest warders I inter-viewed began work at Pollsmoor in 1993, the year before widespread inmate re-volts shook South African prisons. He narrated the pacification of a unit in the Maximum Security Section, the D2 Unit, in the following terms:
After this incident, in D2 unit, nobody wanted to work there, because the inmates were stressed out, they were ready to fight anything, they were just doing the opposite they had to do. And of the whole total of 400 members working there, no one wanted to work there. Big or strong, small or weak, black, white, nobody wanted to go there. I can promise you, I can remember that, the 22ndof September, I was so sick of that, watching every morning the head of prison must beg for people to go and work in that unit, to open the unit, to give the people food, and nobody wanted to go. He was begging everyone.
No sir, no sir, it’s dangerous, I’m not going to put my life in danger. You know, that morning, I said no man, we are warders, inmates can’t control our prison, I said that to myself. And I go to the head of prison and say listen, if you give me 5 minutes, to talk to guys I knew, if those guys say yes I’m going with you to that unit, your problem is solved. I talked to three of my friends, telling them I want to go to D2, and I want to take that unit back from the inmates. Are you willing to go with me. And all three said : Mr.…, with you I’ll go to war. […] We opened up that unit that morning, and for a month we worked. Every morning everything was bloody when you came in. It was just a matter of: it’s you or me. The in-mates are rude, they were trying to stab us, they were trying to kill us, but we beat them, we beat them in every way, because we were committed. If one goes in, everybody goes in. Same in every cell. Six months later, you didn’t even hear about D2. There was dis-cipline. Before no members wanted to walk through the section, even when the doors were locked. Now everybody, even the head of prison is walking through the unit.³⁹
Although this warder did not describe in detail the way he“disciplined”the in-mates, he clearly portrayed the intensity of the violence used during this conflict.
This uncommon testimony ended with yet another surprising comment for an in-terview that took place on prison grounds:
Today I am sick of the prison. We live like with a split personality. If I come home in the afternoon, I wash my face, I wash my hands. It takes 5 minutes to realise: you’re at home now. You’re not at the prison. You must be a father now, you must be a husband, you must chill now. This place really makes you sick.⁴⁰
Speaking with male and female prisoners and with warders of different genera-tions revealed the existence of multiple approaches to the memory of violence.
While interviews with former prisoners and warders conducted outside Polls-moor retraced such memories with a distant gaze, interviews that took place
Interview, Mr. Jacobs, warder, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 25 February 2008.
Ibid.
within the prison walls evoked violence as a continued phenomenon that marked the past as much as the present. The inscription of memory on the pris-oners’ bodies and other “social surfaces and cultural landscapes” also rein-forced the blurring between past and present brutality.⁴¹
Analysing different manifestations of collective memory – on the body as well as on the uniforms and the buildings–provides crucial elements to over-come the shortcomings of this kind of oral history project. The existence, within Pollsmoor and every South African prison, of powerful gangs, some of them dat-ing back to the end of the nineteenth century, has helped to maintain alternative historical narratives of resistance and political agency. Though some gangs, like the Big Fives, based their actions on a systematic collaboration with the admin-istration, the majority of gangs were formed to resist the anomie and brutality of prison life.⁴² The Number, formed by three “brother”gangs, the 26’s, 27’s and 28’s, was particularly leading during apartheid and up to the democratic transi-tion. As studied by Charles Von Onselen, the gang first emerged in the 1980s in the Rand region as a group of bandits who refused to work in the mines.⁴³ After their leader was incarcerated, the gangs only survived in prison, where they strove and developed emblems, tattoos and symbols that permitted the visuali-sation of their structure. They linked these symbols to determined military ranks and completed this visual language with a spoken one, calledsabela.
This organisation, based on amimicry⁴⁴of the late nineteenth-century colo-nial army and penal system, based its internal discipline on a violent judicial system. The gang shared many features with other structures whose illegality and use of violence placed them on the blurred frontier between“criminal”
and“freedom fighter.”In his investigation of the Irish Republican paramilitary organisations, Allen Feldman portrays how“the vernacular depiction of history and the mobilization of popular memory inform and structure political agency”
and how“violent acts on the body,”especially as a consequence of an internal
Allen Feldman,“Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commo-dification, and Actuarial Moralities,”Radical History Review85 (2003): 62.
History Papers, Witwatersrand (HPW), AG3012.“Prison Gangs, Western Cape,”Confidential report by the Intelligence Coordination, 1991; Jonny Steinberg,The Number. One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs(Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2004).
Charles Van Onselen,The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of“Nongoloza”Mathebula, 1867–
1948(Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984).
Homi Bhabha,“Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,”October28 (1984), reprinted in Homi Bhabha,The Location of Culture(New York: Routledge, 1994, 85–92.
disciplinary code,“constituted a material vehicle for constructing memory and embedding the self in social and institutional memory.”⁴⁵
In Pollsmoor, tattoos constituted a visible part of a mythological organisa-tion based on diverse symbols, including flags and military ranks. Tattoos of spe-cific images such as sabres, dice, crowns and poison reflected one’s belonging to a specific gang, while other elements, like stars and glasses, indicated the mem-ber’s rank. The practice was gendered, in that tattoos were not as widespread in the Women’s Prison. In the male sections, memory, subjectivity and identity were tied together on the decorated bodies of the prisoners. Tattoos reflected a mem-ory practice and offered a proof of agency, an ultimate power that resided in the ability to hide or exhibit one’s personal and collective history.⁴⁶In a closed en-vironment characterised by anomie and the near impossibility of self-determina-tion, modifying one’s body was a way to regain some control. Beyond this, tat-toos, alongside the rehearsed history of and rumours about the machinations of the Number, enabled the materialisation of a collective memory otherwise si-lenced by an official historical discourse that featured a supposedly strict rup-ture between prisons during the apartheid regime and their new purpose under a democracy.